This is not a drill: an Extinction Rebellion handbook
Penguin 2019, pbk 186pp, £7.99
In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs addresses the position of the petit bourgeoisie under capitalism. Stating that ‘it cannot possibly remain wholly unaffected by the fact of class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat’, he adds, citing Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte:
‘But as a “transitional class in which the interests of two other classes become simultaneously blunted …” it will imagine itself “to be above all class antagonisms”. Accordingly it will search for ways whereby it will “not indeed eliminate the two extremes of capital and wage labour, but will weaken their antagonism and transform it into harmony”. In all decisions crucial for society its actions will be irrelevant and it will be forced to fight for both sides in turn but always without consciousness.’
Constantly under threat of being thrown into the ranks of the working class, the petit bourgeoisie rails against the excesses of capitalism, its short-sightedness, its irrational greed, its propensity for conflict and war. On the other hand, the petit bourgeoisie also despises the working class: its spontaneity, its instinct to act collectively, its tendency towards resistance, especially when it takes a violent form. The petit bourgeoisie regards these characteristics as symptomatic of a brutish ignorance, a susceptibility to the influence of demagogues, the worst of them communists, and contrasts this to the self-proclaimed rational standpoint of the intelligentsia. Ultimately this supposed rationality amounts to no more than arrogant self-delusion: the petit bourgeois can no more suspend class antagonisms than Canute could halt the tide. The difference of course is that Canute had sufficient wisdom to know the limits of his power – unlike his courtiers.
In the earlier stages of capitalist development, the urban petit bourgeoisie mainly consisted of shopkeepers and small-scale producers whose capital was insufficient for them to avoid having also to work alongside their employees – sweatshops of the worst kind. As capitalism developed, so the ranks of the petit bourgeoisie were augmented by burgeoning layers of professionals such as lawyers, accountants, administrators, civil servants, clerks and journalists. The nature of their lives was determined not by social struggle or collective action, but by their education, talent and personal ambition; they had no direct relation to the productive process. The emergence of monopoly capitalism and the rise of finance capital signalled the transition to imperialism, capitalism in decay. This development necessitated an expansion of this petit bourgeois stratum, not only to serve as managers and administrators in the new imperialist institutions, but also to serve as a bulwark against the mass of the working class. The crumbs that the ruling class passed down from its looting and plunder of the colonies allowed this layer to maintain its affluent position alongside a labour aristocracy, skilled workers who constituted a privileged upper stratum of the working class and whose collective organisations excluded the mass of unskilled workers.
This process continued during the post-war boom as the growth of state employment provided conditions for the emergence of a new form of the labour aristocracy, one whose privileges were mediated through state-provided services rather than through the market, and which benefitted from improved employment conditions determined in major part by trade union collective bargaining. As boom gave way to crisis, however, its conditions began to change: trade unions became enfeebled by anti-trade union laws, and position and ability became more the determinant for sustaining individual privilege, stimulating the development of a petit bourgeois individualist mentality. These new crisis conditions also promoted the development of a hugely inflated financial and banking sector to underpin the looting and plunder of the under-developed countries, providing employment for hundreds of thousands of highly-paid accountants and other financial professionals. Training this new petit bourgeoisie provided lucrative career opportunities for the intelligentsia in a much expanded higher education sector.
The petit bourgeoisie cannot play an independent role in the class struggle. But as Marx observed, its conceit is that it stands above the class struggle, able from this position to advise the ruling class to temper its greed and short-sightedness to prevent social conflict, while warning the working class that it should confine its resistance to a respectable bourgeois legality. Such petit bourgeois arrogance finds its perfect expression in This is not a drill’s ringing declaration that ‘Extinction Rebellion thinks beyond politics’ (p145 and then repeated p161 following contributions from Green MP Caroline Lucas and Labour MP Clive Lewis). In other words, XR is beyond class struggle, on an entirely different plane of existence and consciousness where the working class does not even exist. Thus, in an article remarkable for its profusion of banalities (eg, ‘violence destroys democracy’, p100), its principal ideologue Roger Hallam claims the organisation ‘is now a movement of scientists, academics, lawyers, diplomats, councillors, campaigners, teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, writers, actors, graphic designers, psychologists’ (p102). Set aside nurses and teachers and we have a fairly extensive roll call of the petit bourgeoisie. And although the list does not include the 2.5 million British private landlords, this oversight has been corrected by the creation of an XR Facebook community group. Naturally, there is not a corresponding community group for the working class tenants they rob.
XR’s Media and Managing Coordinator Ronan McNern claims that ‘to achieve social change the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population is needed. It is that 3.5% we want to engage’ (p126). Where does XR get this 3.5% figure from? Step forward two apologists for US imperialist interests, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (cited by two essays on p126 and p136) who claim to show that non-violent movements have a greater chance of success than violent ones, and that a movement comprising 3.5% of the population is a tipping point where members of the security forces abandon the given regime and join the popular struggle. Their work requires a crude reductionism to create a supposed order out of the more than 300 social movements they claim to analyse. They shoehorn this mass of collective human activity, undertaken in a myriad of different economic, political and social circumstances, into fewer than a dozen parameters, in order to inform US imperialism’s foreign policy. On this frankly astonishing basis XR erects its whole non-violent direct action approach.
In reality, the choice between violent and non-violent struggle is never an abstract one; it is always determined by the political needs of the moment and the relationship of class forces, and is never a binary question, either one or the other.
It is important to look at the political stance of Chenoweth and Stephan to highlight how politically loaded their work is. For instance, the Cuban revolution is categorised as a failure of violent struggle, as according to Chenoweth in particular, it merely replaced one dictatorship with another. Stephan openly backed the Guaido-led movement against Venezuela’s President Maduro as it was a laboratory test for Chenoweth’s and her theories. Backed completely by the US, Guaido’s campaign in January was to present a non-violent face to the world and encourage military leaders to abandon the PSUV government. The operation involved international media censorship both of Guaido’s reactionary programme and violent past, and of working class support for the Bolivarian revolution. Undoubtedly Guaido had the support of 3.5% of the Venezuelan people. But the middle class layers that Guaido mobilised were no match for the massive working class resistance to his coup attempts, and the result has been a fiasco for the US-promoted counter-revolution.
In reality, the choice between violent and non-violent struggle is never an abstract one; it is always determined by the political needs of the moment and the relationship of class forces, and is never a binary question, either one or the other. The Cuban revolution involved mass open non-violent struggle alongside the guerrilla movement. The same was true of the Irish liberation struggle: mass protests led by the Relatives Action Committees in the late 1970s complemented the armed struggle of the IRA. They were not counter-posed in the minds of the participants in either case; nor was there ever a matter of principle involved. It is obvious what interest US policy makers have in Chenoweth’s and Stephan’s work: they want to seek out and sponsor movements mobilising against regimes which are inimical to US interests, or which have become political liabilities, knowing that if such movements are led by better-off professionals and the petit bourgeoisie, they will be susceptible to US funding and promotion.
Fidel and Raul Castro with guerilla fighters participating in the armed revolutionary struggle in Cuba, 1959
Having established XR’s strategy on a thoroughly reactionary foundation, the resulting superstructure – and it is a very complex and bureaucratic edifice – has as its sole purpose the maintenance of tight control over XR activities, and the exclusion of any concept of class struggle. The alpha and omega are non-violence: as Hallam says, ‘non-violent discipline is rule number one for all participants’ (p101). Logically, this negates several of XR’s other ten Principles: for instance, Principle five, ‘we value reflecting and learning’ has to exclude consideration of anything that contradicts Chenoweth’s and Stephan’s work, and Principle six, ‘we value everyone and every part of everyone’ – but not communists. However, it does complement Principle eight: ‘we avoid naming and shaming’, which doubtless comforts private landlords as they squeeze the last drop of blood out of working class tenants. The petit bourgeoisie is looking after its own in this climate crisis – as is the ruling class and its representatives whom XR refuses to call to account.
If this review has concentrated on a small number of issues raised by the book, it is because of its negligible intellectual content. It might be suggested that one or two of the articles in the first half of the book have a slightly greater substance. Farhana Yamin, for instance, states that ‘The new movement must be based on the reality that the legacy of colonialism, combined with current forms of capitalism based on never-ending extractive growth, is literally killing us. The reality is that four environmental defenders a week are being killed in the Global South’ (p23). But her conclusion, that ‘we must succeed in catalysing a peaceful revolution to end the era of fossil fuels, nature extraction and capitalism’ (p27) begs the question: which is more important, being peaceful, or saving the planet? And the phrase ‘Global South’ serves to obscure the predatory relationship that exists between the imperialist powers – the Global North – and the mass of under-developed and oppressed countries. Anti-imperialist politics can then be brushed aside as unwanted ‘naming and shaming’.
Among the direst of contributions is an essay by Kate Raworth who is somebody in a school of thought called ‘doughnut economics’; she believes that ‘our economies are politically addicted to growth because pension funds and the job market have become structurally dependent upon it’ (p150), and in addition, ‘no government wants to lose their place in the G20 photo’ because their economy stops growing. Poor Marx: if only he had lived long enough he would have had to realise that Capital was now just missing the point – accumulation is merely a problem of the triple-lock pension and governmental ambition. Replete with diagrams suitable for primary school, Raworth’s pages epitomise the poverty of petit bourgeois thought that threads its way through this book.
This is not a drill could have provided a political education for those who have been drawn into the movement against climate change. But that is not the intention of XR. It is determined that the most backward and conservative politics – and it is politics despite the claims of its leadership – serve as the hallmark of XR. Never mind the references to ‘transformation’ which litter the book, the nature of such transformation cannot be spelled out because it becomes political. Ignore the breathless and self-absorbed references to ‘rebels’ and ‘rebellion’, for, despite those XR actions deliberately designed to break the law, no real challenge to climate change is possible on the basis of petit bourgeois fantasy. The only way forward is on the basis of class politics which challenge imperialism’s plunder and looting of the rest of the world.
Robert Clough
FRFI 271 August/September 2019
